Club Troppo

My previous post - ' With friends like this’: Labor policies and the commercial, independent visual arts sector - was kindly posted by Ken Parish, 6 June. In many ways, artist resale royalties are intrinsically a throwback to the pre-reform days of the 1970s and '80s. The roya...

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For quite a few years Club Troppo has had a self-appointed mission to bring the best of blogosphere writing to a wider audience. There’s a lot of rich, diverse, high quality material out there, much more so than in the mainstream “print” media, degraded as it is by competitive...

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I have a running conversation with Henry Ergas in which I argue that one could get a long way in economics just by not doing silly things - ie there are plenty of $100 bills on the pavement. He doesn't seem to agree. But here's a $100 bill on the pavement. From today's column...

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I've been asked to pontificate on this subject on national radio on Sunday night. My main message will be that yes, manufacturing will be smaller than now and will generally follow the trend it's been following and that that's fine. There's not much that's special about manufa...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsGc2r0m4k Coroner Elizabeth Morris's findings 1987 Royal Commission (Justice Trevor Morling) Coroner Barrtt's original findings (1981) [caption id="attachment_20121" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Doesn't Colin Wicking have a patent o...

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White to play D Tomic vs F Winzbeck 44. ? See game for solution. about our puzzles Still, perhaps not so tricky if you're used to solving these puzzles.

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Right now, for those that are interested, there's a Big Chess Tournament on. The Tal Memorial (which you can follow as the games are played here ) in which ten of the top fifteen players in the world are competing, including three rated over 2,800. Luke McShane is the only one...

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So, Spain got another 100 billion to sort out its banks . There seem to be very few strings attached to this bailout: the money comes from the recently set-up European stability funds (EFSF and ESM). The central Spanish government gets it and its up to the Spanish to figure ou...

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I see John Quiggin is touting Thursday (give or take a few days) as the tenth anniversary of the birth of his blog. I can't be even that precise, because this blog has been through several iterations, and the early days coincided with my marriage breakup so events tend to be a...

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The grand nephew of the Belanglo murderer has conducted a kind of ecstasy killing - which is to say he and another person dragged someone into the Belanglo forest and humiliated and terrified the victim before executing him with an axe, recording the incident and boasting abou...

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Like lots of people, I've always been fond of Marilyn. She was an interesting and courageous person. I liked her apparent seriousness. And the cut of her ideological jib. She was one of the few people who stood against McCarthyism. Yet I always harboured the view that this was...

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I could have made this a comment to yesterday's dodgy asylum seeker dilemma post, but I thnk it deserves a thread all on its own. One of the more interesting but largely unexamined aspects of statistics about asylum seekers in Australia is the stark disparity between success/a...

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Savvy speculators have been making billions from the European crisis by second-guessing the politics. For instance, whilst big banks were forced to take a 70% haircut on their Greek bonds in March, some savvy investors that bought them up simply refused the haircut and got pai...

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by Jonah Lehrer - Smarter people are even more vulnerable to basic thinking errors than less intelligent ones.

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These articles might be a week or two old, but they're well worth reading if you haven't done so already ...

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[caption id="attachment_20019" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Australian Aboriginal Art is much sought after internationally, but Australians overall and Aborigines themselves benefit little from it (and even less since Labor's Resale Royalty Scheme which is the subje...

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Monday evening's Four Corners program about people smugglers gaining fraudulent entry to Australia didn't derail the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney's propaganda campaign even for a moment: The Four Corners’ people smuggling program has only added to the demonisation that surr...

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[ first published at Prawfsblawg by Paul Horwitz. ] Jeffrey Rosen has a new piece at TNR about what he calls "The New Textualism" -- originalism for political liberals, in other words. It argues that liberals have failed by making non-originalist arguments for their desired re...

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[ first published at The Failed Estate by Mr Denmore. ] The debate over media regulation has reached an impasse: In the one corner, the unrepresentative left-liberal academic elitist swill seeking to silence free media with their jackbooted authoritarianism; in the other, the...

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[ first published at OpenDemocracy by Leanne Weber. ] Since 1993 a staggering 16,136 deaths ? at the borders of Europe have been recorded by the activist network UNITED ? . This will be a considerable under-estimate of the true death toll, since many deaths at sea - which acco...

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